I haven’t fully finished up setting the blog yet, but I wanted to blog about some useful and not-very-well-known Microsoft projects, tools and technologies.
Unfortunately, Microsoft advertises way too much to regular users, and doesn’t take advantage of the influencial student/developer/power user market segment, which is usually the most vocal Anti-Microsoft. You can throw words like “SuperFetch” at an engineering student that uses Linux all you want, it probably won’t impress him much. Now show him PowerShell connecting to his NFS shares through a Windows Server 2003 R2 machine with Subsystem for Unix Applications and he might raise an eyebrow.
I’ve had to explain NT’s subsystem design twice this week and I always get a “wow? really? NT can run POSIX?” Yup, and NT 5.2 SP1 can even run 64-bit POSIX and debug them in Visual Studio 2005. NT 5.2 is also called Windows Server 2003. It’s basically a kernel that’s 30% faster then XP’s and was used as the core for Vista. If you want a fast OS with an optimized kernel and don’t want to take part of the “Vista Experience”, you should consider it.
Anyways, without further ado (visit the links for information, I could blog entire pages about these). All these are FREE!
News/Community
- Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/
- CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/
Downloads:
- Microsoft Robotics Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/default.aspx
- Microsoft Detours: http://research.microsoft.com/sn/detours/
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C09B5A2D-EB6A-44B6-8BBD-3764A2FDA9CE&displaylang=en
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5677ddc4-5035-401f-95c3-cc6f46f6d8f7&displaylang=en
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 PowerToys: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd7c6e48-e41b-48e3-881e-a0e6e97f9534&DisplayLang=en
- Getting Visual C#/C++ 2005 Express to work with PREfast: http://kernelmustard.com/2006/10/08/code-analysis-with-visual-c-express-edition/
- Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1 with R2: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/trial/default.mspx
- Microsoft PowerShell: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CF02F527-9527-49CC-BDC5-23C3C22493E0&displaylang=en
- Microsoft Driver Development Kit for Windows 2003: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/0/f/90f019ac-8243-48d3-91cf-81fc4093ecfd/1830_usa_ddk.iso
- Microsoft XNA: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=868FE562-5DED-4BB1-8648-708D3481BDA3&displaylang=en
- Microsoft XNA Express: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AADBB141-D28F-4ED0-9673-DF4D16DE3AFA&displaylang=en
- Microsoft Platform SDK and .NET 3.0: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7614FE22-8A64-4DFB-AA0C-DB53035F40A0&displaylang=en
Source Code:
- Windows CE 6.0 Source Code: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7E286847-6E06-4A0C-8CAC-CA7D4C09CB56&displaylang=en
- MechCommander2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6d790cde-c3e5-46be-b3a5-729581269a9c&DisplayLang=en
- Allegiance: http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details%5C8788ebe2-4b00-4fbe-af70-9a4459b1e594%5CDetails.aspx?CategoryID=
- IPv6 TCPIP Stack: http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/msripv6.htm
I’ll add more as I remember them, there’s really a lot of great stuff at Microsoft that’s untapped to!
Also, if you have anything to add, please comment!